Contact us: +66 2-266 3698

Thai Immigration Chief Warns Against Illegitimate Visa Services

See transcript of the above video below:

As the title of this video suggests, we're going to be discussing Thai Immigration; specifically some recent remarks that the Visa Chief, the current acting Head of Thai Immigration, Lieutenant General Surachate Hakpan, has made with respect to issues pertaining to visa brokers.

In videos in the past, I made note of the fact that falsification of documentation and visa brokers associated therewith, there were arrests made, there's been a substantial crackdown on document falsification, as apparently that was more than I knew apparently in the past, but that was something of a common practice. It was providing essentially fraudulent documentation and as I went in in many other videos on this channel, Immigration is now working hand-in-hand more closely with other organizations that produce documentation that is necessary for Immigration extensions. They are working more closely with their sister organizations in order to better ascertain whether or not certain documents were issued lawfully, whether or not they are in fact genuine documentation pertaining to, for example a Business Visa renewal here in Thailand.

But that being said, in a recent article from the Bangkok Post, the title is “Visa Crackdown to Stay”, the date of it is 16 December, 2018, bangkokpost.com. Some interesting quotes. Quoting directly from the article, "The visa issue is also a problem when foreigners are lured into renewing their visas via brokers. Checks by police found their services involve many irregularities involving forging documents that certify applicant’s financial status and false claims of their money records." And it goes on. I urge those who are watching this video to check out that article directly. It goes on to note the various types of visas for example marriage visas, retirement visas, require a certain level of financial assets to be able to either be shown or a certain amount of income to be shown in connection with extension of both an O visa and an OA Visa; that is for retirement. The first one, the O visa is for marriage, the second one, the OA, is for retirement. Also they went on to note that again forging documents, documentation irregularities, issues with respect to falsified documentation pertaining to bank accounts etc., that that kind of thing they are looking at it and it looks to me like Immigration Officials are going to be more assiduous in their scrutiny of Immigration documentation and probably more suspicious for lack of a better term of certain types of visa services. As I said previously there have been cases where those involved in assisting people with visas have been arrested and fined. Folks have been deported mostly pertaining to purely falsified documentation and I mean documentation that was made up out of whole cloth and presented as if it was an authentic documentation from a given Government Ministry.

How this is going to play out in a sort of more detailed day to day remains to be seen. But those watching this video, those interested in how the Immigration apparatus works here in Thailand, should be aware that again the title of that article was “Visa Crackdown to Stay”. The Immigration Police have made it very clear that Operation X-ray Outlaw Foreigner is going to continue. It remains operational and now on top of it they are going ahead and more carefully scrutinizing visa services and visa brokers so to speak and for that reason those interested in extending their stay in the Kingdom are well-advised to contact a legal professional and ascertain their options perhaps rather than dealing with someone who may or may not be doing everything exactly on the up-and-up.

So again the thing to take away from this video is, yes the Crackdown continues and moreover it looks to me like Immigration Officers are going to go ahead and take an even broader approach with respect to their enforcement activities and for this reason, this can have an even more substantial impact on those wishing to extend their stay in the Kingdom of Thailand.